Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — The two retired senior U.S. officials who oversaw an internal State Department
review of last year’s attacks on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, yesterday rejected
as “an inappropriate precondition” a Republican request that they submit to a closed-door interview
before testifying in public.

The letter from former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen added new
tension to the battle between Republican lawmakers and the Obama administration over the assaults
last Sept. 11 on a diplomatic mission and a CIA complex that killed four Americans, including Chris
Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

The latest development came as Democrats on Capitol Hill praised the White House for releasing
100 pages of documents that they asserted put to rest Republican charges that the administration
had tried to cover up a bungled response to the attack to protect President Barack Obama’s bid for
re-election.

“I think that on the talking points, the president’s right: That piece of it is a sideshow,”
said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., repeating a description that Obama had used
earlier in the week. “It’s an evasion of what we really need to do. We need to pass a budget that
fully protects to the extent that we can our diplomats abroad.”

Despite the White House document release, House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester, told a
news conference that an investigation by five GOP-run committees into the attacks and the
administration’s response would forge ahead, contending that the White House has more to
disclose.

“We have a job to get to the truth. And the administration can make this a lot easier by doing
what they did yesterday: turning over emails from Benghazi,” Boehner said.

The emails and other documents released on Wednesday showed that sweeping changes to talking
points written for Congress that described what happened in Benghazi were made by the CIA, not the
White House. It was the CIA, they indicated, that wrote that the assault stemmed from a spontaneous
protest outside the consulate, although numerous U.S. officials knew at the time that it was a
planned operation by Islamist extremists, some linked to al-Qaida.

A protest never took place, and the CIA has yet to explain how it reached its preliminary
assessment.

The investigation is being spearheaded by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who is chairman of the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Issa asked Pickering and Mullen earlier this week
to submit to a closed-door transcribed interview about the Accountability Review Board before a
public hearing.